Making Your Characters Authentic - Part 2

Great characters, to enhance their arc, should have a fourth or fifth gear that seems to come out of nowhere.  For example, villains can turn into heroes with an act of kindness that we would never have anticipated, yet when we read the novel closely, we realize that the seed of kindness was planted by the writer from the beginning.  Similarly, characters we start off admiring suddenly disappoint us when they hurt someone they love.  If they don’t realize what they’ve done, figuring out the “why” makes them even more interesting.  Well-conceived characters can help with plot troubles, too, if the writer wakes one morning and isn’t sure where his or her  story is going (happens to most of us).  Instead of robbing a bank, for example, your destitute character decides to give away his last fifty dollars to a stranger.  The wife who has been cheated on, instead of taking revenge on her husband, is filled with insights about her father.  A deeply-felt, richly-imagined character is your writing buddy, your co-conspirator, and their importance to the final product can’t be overstated.